Persianate culture – Brown Pundits

Should Babri Masjid have been moved to Pakistan?

X.T.M · December 14, 2025 · 11 comments

This deliberately provocative piece draws on Kabir’s recent comments, Arkacanda’s excellent essay, Musings on & Answers, and Nikhil’s profound piece in “Urdu: An Indian Language.”

If India wants to avoid future Babri Masjids, it needs a clearer, more orderly doctrine for handling irreconcilable sacred disputes. Excavation, relocation, and compensation should be formalised as the default tools, rather than allowing conflicts to metastasise into civilisational crises. Geography matters. Some sites carry layered sanctity for multiple traditions; others do not. Al-Aqsa, for instance, is both the site of the Jewish Temple and central to Islamic sacred history through the Isra and Miʿraj. Babri Masjid was not comparable. It had no unique pan-Islamic significance, while the site was widely regarded within Hindu tradition as the birthplace of Lord Ram. The same logic applies to Mathura, associated with Lord Krishna. Recognising asymmetry of sacred weight is not prejudice; it is common sense. A rules-based system—full archaeological excavation, dignified relocation of structures where necessary, and generous compensation—would allow India to preserve heritage without endlessly reopening civilisational wounds.

Urdu is not an Indian language but Hindu nationalists made it one

It is a Muslim-inspired language that emerged in India. That distinction matters. Blurring it creates confusion, not harmony. There was an early misstep in North Indian language politics. Modern Hindi was deliberately standardised on Khari Boli rather than on Braj Bhasha or Awadhi, both of which possessed far richer literary lineages. This decision, shaped by colonial administrative needs and North Indian elite nationalism, flattened a complex linguistic ecology and hardened later divides. One unintended consequence was the permanent preservation of Urdu within the Indian subcontinent. Because Khari Boli Hindi remained structurally interchangeable with Urdu, Urdu survived as a parallel high language. Had Braj or Awadhi become the standard instead, that mutual intelligibility would have collapsed, and Urdu would likely have been pushed entirely outside the Indian linguistic sphere.

Persian Linguistic Pride

Today, a similar impulse is at work. There is a growing tendency, often well intentioned, to Indianise the Mughals and Urdu, to fold them into a seamless civilisational story. This misunderstands both history and the settlement that Partition produced. Partition did not merely redraw borders. It separated elites, languages, and political destinies. Urdu crossed that line with Muslim nationalism. It cannot now be reclaimed without ignoring that choice. I say this as someone with both an Urdu-speaking and Persian-speaking inheritance. When I chose which tradition to consciously relearn and deepen, I chose Persian. Not out of sentiment, but judgment. Persian language nationalism remains rigorous, self-confident, and civilisationally anchored. Persian survived empire, exile, and modernity without losing coherence. It carries philosophy, poetry, statecraft, and metaphysics as a single, continuous tradition. Shi‘ism, Persianate culture, and Persian literature remain intertwined. They preserve depth rather than dilute it. As a Bahá’í, that continuity has personal resonance. But the argument does not depend on belief. It stands on history.

Urdu as the “Muslim tongue” Continue reading Should Babri Masjid have been moved to Pakistan?

Who can speak for the “Muslim minority” of India?

X.T.M · December 10, 2025 · 15 comments

Public debates on Indian Muslims often make one basic mistake: they collapse all minorities into a single category and then declare that “everyone is thriving because a few individuals have done well”. This flattens history, erases structure, and turns civilisational questions into census arithmetic.

1. Minorities Are Not Interchangeable

Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists offer no meaningful analogy to Indian Muslims.

Jains were never politically central to the subcontinent.
Sikhs built a regional power, not a pan-subcontinental order.
Buddhists have been demographically marginal for a thousand years.

Indian Muslims were different. For centuries they formed the civilisational elite of North India; shaping courts, languages, music, etiquette, food, architecture, and the ways Indian states understood power. Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Hyderabad were not enclaves. They were the centre of the political and aesthetic world of the Indo-Gangetic plain. A fall from centrality is not comparable to never having been central at all.

2. Individual Success Is Not Structural Health Continue reading Who can speak for the “Muslim minority” of India?

The Mughals Were Not an Indian Dynasty — They Were a Dynasty in India

X.T.M · June 29, 2025 · 67 comments

The Mughals were not an Indian dynasty in the civilizational sense. They were a dynasty in India — rooted in the Persianate ecumene that stretched from Anatolia to Bengal, but distinct from the indigenous Indic civilizational framework.

Richard Eaton’s India in the Persianate Age captures this well. The Mughal elite, like other Turko-Mongol polities across the Islamic world, operated through a tri-layered framework: Arabic religion, Persianate high culture, and Turko-Mongolian kingship. This pattern held from Egypt to Samarkand — and India was no exception.

But here’s the distinction: while in places like Iran, Central Asia, and even parts of Anatolia, the ruling elite and the subject populations often shared linguistic, religious, or cultural proximity, in India the Mughal court sat atop a society whose foundational worldview — Dharma, Sanskritic cosmology, ritual plurality — was wholly different.

Yes, the Mughals were cosmopolitan. Yes, Akbar attempted synthesis. But at their core, the Mughal dynasty retained its sense of separateness — not just politically, but civilizationally. Persian remained the language of court and culture, their aesthetics leaned West, and their ethos remained imperially aloof. Their legitimacy was not drawn from Indian sacred geography but from Turanic, Persian, and Islamic claims of kingship.

Contrast this with the Suri dynasty, which, despite being devoutly Muslim, left a remarkably grounded imprint. Sher Shah Suri ruled in Hindavi. His administrative and infrastructural legacy felt local, even national. In some ways, paradoxically, he felt more Indian than the Mughals did.

This isn’t about Islam being foreign to India. Islam has deep roots in the subcontinent — from Kerala to Bengal to Kashmir. It has been deeply indigenized across regions. But when Islam arrives twinned with Persianate high culture, it becomes something else: a hybrid elite formation, distinct both from Sanskritic Hinduism and from vernacular Islam.

The British Raj, too, was alien — but ironically, its later administrators localized many elements of their rule. The Mughals, by contrast, represented a more refined foreignness: imperial, hybrid, and between worlds.

It’s telling that the most influential women of the Mughal court—Noor Jahan, Mumtaz Mahal, and Hamida Banu Begum—were all of Persian origin. They wielded real power: issuing firmans, shaping court politics, commissioning architecture. In contrast, the Hindu-indigenous consorts—Jodha Bai, Anarkali, even Aurangzeb’s Hindu Rajput lover—were celebrated in romance, not governance. They were symbols, not strategists. Influence, in the Mughal world, came not with local integration but with Persian pedigree. That, in itself, says a great deal.

So no — the Mughals were not an Indian dynasty. They were a dynasty in India. That distinction matters.